


Equally Lacking in Subtlety

by jinkandtherebels



Category: Free!
Genre: Gen, Winter, snowball fights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 12:45:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2851238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinkandtherebels/pseuds/jinkandtherebels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rin really hates the snow. Sousuke is less than sympathetic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Equally Lacking in Subtlety

**Author's Note:**

> Giftfic for my darling darlingkey, as she adores these two idiots. Merry Christmas everyone!
> 
> (Alternately titled: Rin Is A Frigid Bitch and Sousuke Gives Me Heartburn.)

Rin looked out of the window and glared.

Actually he’d been glaring for a good five minutes now, but the snow was irritatingly unaffected.

(It was kind of an ego killer, to be honest. Normally Rin’s scowl could send grown men running for the hills if he was really trying. Mother Nature apparently hadn’t gotten the message.)

It wasn’t like he had anything against snow on principle. Not like Haru, who walked around in a cloud of grump from December to March because he couldn’t swim outside and apparently that made him prone to existential crises. Whatever. Rin wasn’t _that_ bad, but he had been hoping to get one more swim out of the outdoor pool at Samezuka before the cold weather really kicked in.

(His teammates were of the opinion that it’d been too cold for outdoor swimming for at least a month, but Momo had been the one to finally put his foot down last week because _all the training in the world won’t help if we’re dying of pneumonia during tryouts, yeah?_ Fine. Clearly they were weak and would not survive the winter.)

But no. Instead he’d woken up to three feet of snow and what was worse, it didn’t look like it would be stopping any time soon.

Rin glared harder. No effect. The white flakes continued to pile up, merrily oblivious to a seething teenager attempting to melt all of it through sheer force of will.

He was debating crawling back into bed, sticking his head under his pillow and trying to sleep through the apparent snowpocalypse (seriously, he’d thought he was living in Japan, not freaking Antarctica, what the actual fuck) when his cell phone rang.

(And by ‘rang’ of course Rin meant ‘blared out the _Jaws_ theme song as loudly and obnoxiously as possible’. Because his so-called friends were terrible people who _knew_ he was technologically inept and couldn’t figure out how to change a fucking ringtone.)

Rin picked it up with a curt “Yeah?”

“Someone sounds pissed,” Sousuke mused on the other end. “Momo make off with your hair gel again?”

Why, _why_ did he call these people his friends again?

“It’s nothing,” Rin grumbled. “Just the weather.”

“Not into the holiday spirit. I’m shocked.”

Ignoring Sousuke’s deadpan, Rin hissed into the phone, “It is _December first_.”

“…Early holiday spirit, then.”

Rin groaned in frustration. “You know what this means, right? No outdoor swimming for the rest of the year. We won’t even be able to jog outside unless we want to die slippery, icy deaths. I’m going to lose my mind.”

“I think you’ll manage,” Sousuke said dryly. “On that note, you should come outside. I want to show you something.”

Rin was instantly suspicious.

“Yeah? And what’s that?”

“Just come outside.”

Even more suspicious. But then, Rin thought, casting one last halfhearted glare out the window, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do. He sighed.

“Yeah, okay, give me a minute.”

More like ten, actually, because when it was this fucking cold Rin refused to go outside in less than four layers, but it wasn’t like Sousuke didn’t know that. If he was too damn stoic to wait indoors like a normal human being, that wasn’t Rin’s fault, and neither would be the inevitable frostbite.

.

It took him three tries to open the damn door.

It wasn’t, like, a Hulk door or some shit like that, _normally_ Rin had no problem with the door, but today there was three feet of snow piled up on the other side and that was making it harder than it should be to just _push_.

Finally he managed by throwing himself bodily against the door until it shook on its hinges, which opened up a tiny sliver of room that RIn proceeded to wriggle through.

And immediately regretted it because _cold fucking cold holy shit_.

Pulling his scarf up over his nose, RIn started casting around for Sousuke. It wasn’t like he was actually capable of hiding in plain sight, being approximately ten feet tall and with the shoulders of a linebacker, but unless what he wanted to ‘show’ Rin was free tickets to Bermuda (or someplace equally not-freezing) that had miraculously fallen out of the sky, Rin was tempted to just go back inside and hibernate until spring.

And that was when the snowball hit him squarely in the face.

Though briefly distracted by the numbing cold spreading over one side of his head, Rin recovered quickly, no doubt helped along by the heat of his _burning rage_.

“The _fuck_ ,” he sputtered, squinting through white flakes to see his monolith of a teammate standing a few feet away. Sousuke was dusting snow off of navy blue gloves and looking supremely unconcerned.

If Rin were a Yankee character in a bad movie he’d have been shouting ‘ _You wanna die?!_ ’ (or something similarly lacking in subtlety) at the top of his lungs. As it was, he took a deep breath and reminded himself that he liked Sousuke kind of an embarrassing amount and would probably be upset later if he murdered him in a fit of cold-induced wrath.

So again he said, calmer this time, “What the fuck.”

Sousuke half-shrugged. “I know how you get when you’re cooped up inside for too long.”

Rin paused, waiting for anything about that statement to start making sense.

It didn’t.

“So you decided to make me feel better about all the snow…by giving me pneumonia?” he suggested. Hey, it was as good a theory as anything else.

Sousuke snorted. “No. I figured you could use a different kind of competition to keep you from going stir-crazy and scaring the shit out of everybody inside.”

…Huh. After a second where he wasn’t sure if he should be offended or not, Rin decided that that actually kind of made sense.

“Wait,” he said, starting to grin, “you’re telling me you thought shoving snow in my face would make me _less_ likely to scare the shit out of people? Seriously?”

“There’s no one else here,” Sousuke pointed out, a wry note in his voice that usually meant he’d won whatever the contest was this time. “And you don’t scare me.”

Rin opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again with a snap. He smirked instead.

“That was your first mistake,” he retorted, bending down and scooping up a handful of snow. It was fluffy and dense and the perfect consistency for packing.

(Sousuke didn’t realize what he was getting himself into; Rin was a bona fide connoisseur of snowballs. Gou had picked up the trick at an unnaturally early age and pelted him with perfect little spheres until he learned how to do it for the sake of self-preservation.)

What resulted was nothing less than an all-out snowball war. Which only got more chaotic when Momo appeared out of nowhere (Rin was pretty sure he’d been buried in a snow bank and even more sure he didn’t want to know why) and started flinging snow everywhere, and somehow he’d managed to drag Nitori into the melee and Rin was pretty damn certain they were all going to come down with something, but whatever. It wasn’t like they were going to get much outdoor activity in for a few days anyway.

Besides, he admitted to himself, there were worse ways to spend the first snow day of the year.


End file.
